"A beastly affair": visual representations of animality and the politics of the Dreyfus Affair.

Jones, David C.

The Dreyfus Affair, as with other major events in French history, produced its own visual legacy--a contrived and characteristic iconography composed by artists and illustrators of the time. In almost any collection of political cartoons or caricatures relating to the Affair one will find grotesque and fantastical renderings of beasts, animals, demons, and various hybrid forms. These monsters of the French fin-de-siecle owe their existence almost entirely to imagination of the extreme anti-Dreyfusard and antisemitic right. Supporters of Dreyfus, in contrast, favoured an iconography of a less malodorous nature, employing idealistic symbols such as the female nude representing Truth and Justice, or various depictions of Christ. The political and aesthetic cleavage between the two factions allows for an investigation into the motivations behind anti-Dreyfusard cultural production as it relates to broader, popular concerns throughout French society. It also exposes some of the deeper lines of conflict within the Affair, particularly some fundamentally held ontological notions about society, nation and the body, and how they came to be drawn. It is important to note that visual depictions of animality are to be found almost exclusively in the nascent "gutter press"--the cheaply produced daily broadsheets that littered French cities following technological advances in printmaking. Images of the animal produced for mass consumption by anti-Dreyfusards attempted to shape public opinion by appealing to a potent mixture of fear, discomfort, nostalgia, and heroism, whether biological, national, or bodily in nature.

In recent years, scholarship on the Dreyfus Affair has uncovered some of the deeper issues at stake in what was often represented as a heroic victory over bigotry, anti-modernity, and antisemitism--the "moment in the conscience of the world." (1) Recent trends in the history of the Affair have offered up new ways of conceptualizing the rifts and conflicts that flared in French society. Christopher Forth's investigations of masculinity and body politics have helped to highlight the problematic role of heroism during the Affair. Here, the articulations of a heroic masculinity in the rhetoric on both sides share common ideological grounding, such that Dreyfus himself eventually came to be distanced from his own cause. (2) Building on this, Venita Datta has argued that Dreyfus remains an outsider in to the "heroism" attached to the Affair in French memory, with the problems surrounding the erection of his statue stemming from his continued status as victim rather than hero. (3) Ruth Harris has noted the "maleness" associated with historical attention to the Affair, as an adventure in espionage, diplomacy, and politics, or as a struggle between male intellectuals and anti-intellectuals. (4) Harris has focused on the anti-Dreyfusard artist Gyp (Sybille Gabriel Marie Antoinette de Martel de Janville), whose exceptional position as a female extremist contributes importantly to the "investigation of the psychological dynamics underpinning the Affair." (5) Additionally, scholars have turned to the visual culture of the Dreyfus Affair to explore issues of representation, identity, and politics. Normal Kleeblatt's study of the scatological and Maya Balakirsky-Katz's study on the use of pig as Judensau attempted to look at underlying motifs or modes of expression--excrement and the Jew-pig respectively--in order to uncover the anxieties and prejudices articulated in the illustrations. (6) These two studies, however, converged upon the figure of Zola, whose intellectualism, Naturalist literature, and defense of Dreyfus earned him the scorn of traditionalists, conservatives and antisemites. Nonetheless, scholarly attention to the composition of the images as a "visual polemic," as Kleeblatt has coined it, is now recognized as central to our understanding of how the Affair was conceptualized by both sides. (7)

I. The Image and the Cycle of Readership

Political cartooning was born in France and many scholars have seen its "golden age" in the time of Honore Daumier and his satirical renderings of Louis Phillipe. (8) This was in large part due to the nature of censorship during the July Monarchy. In order to avoid direct conflict with the state, the satirical content of political caricatures had to be constantly encrypted via witty and complex symbolism. The press laws of 1881, however, combined with technological advances in photomechanical reproduction, paved the way for a wealth of new printed illustrations available to the French masses. The lifting of strict, antiquated rules governing the depictions of political figures and politicians translated into depictions of a more unrestrained nature. Images could be reproduced at a lower cost, and thus on a greater scale, leading to the appearance of newspapers which represented more marginal sections of French society. Antisemitic, anarchist, socialist, Catholic, and militarist newspapers proliferated during the period, competing with larger, better-known newspapers. These papers, considered "gutter press" because of the blatant and vulgar nature of their editorial rhetoric, played a major role in articulating the more disturbing emotions associated with the Dreyfus Affair. The discursive circle of production and consumption was completed by the rising rates of readership and literacy at the end of the century. As Michael Burns has noted, this translated into "a wide and eager audience of new readers, many of whom still believed, as they had been taught to believe, what they read." (9)

Historians have noted that the culmination of the Dreyfus case into a full-blown affair was very much made possible due to the rise of the mass media. For the biographer of Edouard Drumont, Frederick Busi, "the Dreyfus case may be seen as a struggle which was caused, reflected and ultimately resolved by the press." (10) After all, the antisemitic La Libre Parole announced the arrest of a Jewish traitor "A. Dreyfus," while L'Aurore printed Zola's infamous J'Accuse prompting the intervention of public figures on behalf of Dreyfus. The importance of Drumont in particular has been noted, with Michael Burns referring to him as "the most powerful antisemite of the European fin-de-siecle," and Pierre Olivier Perl characterizing his bestselling La France Juive as an example of "l'esprit du temps." (11) However, Jean-Denis Bredin's masterful study L'Affaire downplays the role in which the mass media--especially the gutter press--played in the unfolding of the Affair itself. Bredin suggests that the low circulation rates of the antisemitic press, compared to the more moderate papers, should be borne in mind when evaluating the state of French society during the period of the Affair. (12) Nonetheless, the purpose of this essay is to look beyond the images to the ideas and conflicts that shaped their composition, whether scientific, bio-medical, literary, or visual, in order to explore the way in which visual culture nourished the potency of fin-de-siecle ideologies. In this sense, it is useful to realize that marginal newspapers remained influential in places that the mainstream press refused to tread. As Bredin notes, the major newspapers of France at the time, Le Petit Journal, Le Petit Parisien, and Le Journal, devoted very little to the Affair. (13) Although readership and circulation were relatively low, antisemitic papers like La Libre Parole, L'Intransigeant, and others, must be considered of primary importance because of their visual contribution to popular, often sensationalist discourse. (14) Although postcard circulation is more difficult to ascertain, this form was nowhere else more influential in Europe than in France. (15) The weekly satirical Musee des Horreurs postcards, depicting various political figures in animalistic caricature, were so inflammatory that they were banned by the Ministry of the Interior. Finally, fin-de-siecle antisemitism, the pulsating heart of the Affair, helped draw readership through the sensationalism of scandal and scapegoating. It was thus through more marginal conduits that the representation, digestion, and the imagination of the Affair took course. (16)

The role of the illustrated image in the cycle of. media readership was twofold. On the one hand, traditional images in newspapers featured illustrated busts of important political or public figures to accompany the text. Famous buildings or colonial mysteries could also be featured as illustrated reportage, bringing readers closer to the places and spaces that made headlines in the news. On the other hand, there was the possibility for satire. French illustrators such as Honore Daumier, Alfred Le Petit, and J.J. Grandville had developed the art of caricature throughout the early nineteenth century, rearing it into its modern form. Large, exaggerated craniums reflected satirical physiognomy, anthropomorphicized animals undercut political legitimacy; symbols and icons were interspersed to create deep, allegorical compositions with critical bite, while text was reserved for captions and labels. Animals were useful visual containers because they were able to convey complex statements through simple composition. Fin-de-siecle caricature was thus crystal clear in its political intent and rhetoric. In contrast, the increasingly abstract work of painters in the realm of high art, as Linda Nochlin argues, was no indicator of Dreyfusard affiliation. (17) Although the possibility of photography emerged at the end of the century, its usefulness satisfied only the former purpose of newspaper illustration. The quality of the medium as a device for capturing reality was ill-suited to the type of allegorical hyperbole that matched the written rhetoric of the press. (18) It must also be said that the medium was too expensive to be used on such a vast scale as for the daily gutter press. (19)

As Richard Griffiths has noted, the visual materials of the Dreyfus Affair owed their popularity and prominence due to their "immediacy." (20) For some historians, the 1881 press laws sounded the death knell for the golden age of caricature. The explosion of political illustration during the Dreyfus Affair has been seen as somewhat less complex or intelligent (and thus of diminished merit) in allegory, allusion, and composition. (21) The cartoons complemented the gratuitous rhetoric of the time--indeed, such was their intended purpose. Edouard Drumont, in the first issue of his illustrated supplement to the antisemitic, anti-Dreyfusard daily, La Libre Parole, announced: "The image completes the work of the pen. It can address what the pen still cannot touch." (22) The illustrations of La Libre Parole Illustree and much of the other antisemitic press, attempted to augment the venomous allegories and ideologies of the editorials. Drumont's paper, from which many of the images discussed below come, wielded a particularly strong influence over the way in which the Dreyfus Affair was imagined visually. As Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci has noted, La Libre Parole Illustree was instrumental in the construction of the iconography of the caricatured Jew. (23) Hunched over, sickly, with an enlarged nose, often bald, and with bushy eyebrows or scruffy facial hair, this caricatured image of the Jew persisted into the era of twentieth-century propaganda, often expressing the biological, rather than anti-capitalist, strain of anti-Jewish imagery. (24) The Affair itself spawned broadsheets dedicated to cartoons and illustrations. The Dreyfusard Le Sifflet and its opponent Psst! ... battled each other through illustrations, often through inversions of each others' front pages. Anti-Dreyfusard cartoons appeared in newspapers like the populist antisemitic L'Intransigeant, the republican Le Grelot, the anti-Dreyfusard Le Pilori, La Silhouette, and Le Pierrot, among others. Following on the distinction in coverage pointed out by Bredin, it was the marginal, gutter press that took the lead in establishing the multitude of illustrations devoted to the Dreyfus Affair.

II. Conceptualizing Animality

The idea of the animal has often been constructed as a signifier of the natural world, as opposed to the "civilized," human world. Conceptualizations of the animal throughout the century had moved away from the Cartesian dynamic, articulated by Descartes centuries before, that all animals operated "like clocks." (25) Rather, they appeared within the dialectics of their natural habitat. Throughout the eighteenth century, classification and taxonomy emerged as the basis for the animal studies. The Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus's Systema Naturce laid the foundation for a taxonomic system of classification based on hierarchies within classes of species. (26) During the middle ages, plants had been understood through their medicinal qualities and organized as such. After Linnaeus they were, along with organisms, configured abstractly, according to the universal premises offered by science. (27) Theorists of natural history, such as the eighteenth-century pioneer Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, attempted to categorize and render the animals of the world through illustration in his thirty-six volume Histoire naturelle, generale et particuliere. Here, animals were analyzed and presented like specimens, rocks, or plants, with their organic qualities available for observation and study. Gradations were assumed to be based on internal determinants which related to a spectrum running from base to perfect.

The emergence of a teleological evolutionary theory in which organisms developed towards a kind of human perfection can be traced to early nineteenth century with the publication of Lamarck's 1815 Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertebres and his concept of "the complexifying force." Here, species adapted to their environments by inheriting useful characteristics in a process of increasing organic complexity leading up to the human. In this regard, the "super perfect" species were those where instinct was tempered by intelligence. (28) Thus the human could be seen as a site of perfection in an order that continued to reflect, from microbe to man, all evolutionary history. Eminent biologist and contemporary of Lamarck, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, described the process of birth from embryo to infant as the unfolding of all evolutionary time. (29) By mid-century, Buffon's call for categorization was being synthesized with the organic teleology of Lamarckian evolution. Sorbonne professor of natural sciences Paul Gervais, in his 1866 Zoologie, comprenant l'anatomie, la physiologie, la classification et l'histoire naturelle des animaux, discussed identification and classification as the means through which "natural truths" could be discovered. (30) Gervais attempted an animal hierarchy attuned to the relative "perfection" of animals. He believed that humanity formed the most perfect of species, standing above a hierarchy of animals relating their proximity to the primordial, with zoophytes and protozoa at the base. There was a natural order to be discovered: "Man and mammals obviously occupy the summit of this scale" he postulated, "next come birds, then reptiles and fish." (31)

Darwin's theory of natural selection, proposed following Lamarck, was treated with scepticism by French scientific institutions. (32) As Ruth Harris has shown, debates surrounding Darwinism in France revolved not around the problems or ideas contained in his Origins of Species, but rather on the more broad moral concepts popularized by others. (33) Darwin's Descent of Man, made it explicitly clear that, rather than human as near-God image of "perfection," man was a direct descendant of the ape. (34) By the late nineteenth century, however, animality was accepted as an innate, physical quality embedded in all creatures humans included. For Paul Vernial, member of the Paris Anthropological Society, "Acts that are essentially instinctive are the same in man as in the animal," however he added, "civilized man, who is obliged, as a result of his social condition, to impose the laws made by him, is constrained to subdue his instincts and replace them with ideas that have acquired their rationale in social utility." (35) The distinction between the two realms was thus to be found in the intellectual condition of human relations--or rather culture, through which humanity regulated and perpetuated itself.

As the Dreyfus Affair flared up in France, Drumont tapped into the concept of an evolutionary cultural specificity that could be adapted for the human world. Targeting Joseph Reinach in La Libre Parole, Drumont proclaimed that "the man does business in the manner of the sons of Shem. Were you to shoot him by accident, after slapping his face with his own epaulets, you still would not succeed in implanting in his brain ideas which he does not possess about honor, duty, and the home-land which are legacies transmitted through innumerable generations. They cannot be improvised." (36) The undeniable proof of Reinach's biological incongruity is found in his putative deviation from traditional codes of honour. As a Jew, he is outside of his natural habitat and alien to the intellectual or cultural qualities that define his humanity. In reality, Reinach duelled three times with his detractors (twice with Paul Deroulede), preserving his honour in the manner of the most upright Frenchman.

The institutional entrenchment of scientific studies of the animal contributed to an extensive spread in the influence and number of zoos throughout eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. Here, the organization of space according to species categorization took three-dimensional form. Comparison as a form of didactic evaluation found its expression in the visual depiction of the zoo cage in the antisemitic press. The bars of the cage, socially understood as a symbol for the bifurcation between human and animal thresholds, were played upon satirically by cartoonists and illustrators of the antisemitic press. In one cartoon produced for La Libre Parole Illustree, a stereotypically rendered Jew approaches a caged elephant. "What a nose on him!" he exclaims, "Is he a Jew?." (37) The Jew then attempts to test the elephant by offering him a cheque. Just as it appears that he will accept, "He took it! ... Reinach away!" the elephant grabs the Jew by the nose. The pleasure that La Libre Parole's readers would have derived from the cartoon relies on the Jewish character's admission of physical and psychological deviance, referenced in his nose and relationship to wealth respectively, and his fitting punishment on these counts. The bars of the cage are penetrated by the cheque, delivered by the Jew to the elephant, and by the animal's trunk, which squeezes the Jewish nose.

The appearance in the antisemitic press of the Boule-de-Juif following the Panama scandal exemplifies many of the converging ideas in scientific discourse and zoology rendered in satirical illustration. The ape/human hybrid Boule-de-Juif--a bad play on Guy de Maupassant's Boule-de-Suif appeared in dozens of cartoons by a variety of artists, including the popular Musee des Horreurs by Victor Lenepveu. Rotund, with sloping ape-brow and hairy knuckles, often dressed, sometimes naked, but always with a blank and dim look on his face, the Boule-de-Juif characterization was directed squarely at Joseph Reinach. Reinach had become a major enemy of the burgeoning popular-nationalist-antisemitic movement led by Edouard Drumont following his minor association with the Panama scandal. His rendering as a "Jew-Ball" is depicted in a cartoon produced during the Affair by Bruno for L'Intransigeant, looking into a cage of monkeys at the zoo (see Figure 1). His dull eyes peer at the howling, laughing monkeys, as they point their fingers at the "Jew-Ball." Reinach, the "ball" thinks dourly,

"All the same, it's true that that they are much better looking than me." (38) The piece has unequivocal overtones of the anti-Darwinist sentiments that played out after the publication of the Origin of Species. The illustration more likely reflects the social Darwinist idea that Reinach is not an animal, but rather a species of inferior humanity, whose racial degeneration manifests in his comparative ugliness--when compared to the monkeys. Rochefort, in his annual cartoon compendium to L'Intransigeant reflected on the special relationship cultivated between his artists and their disinclined muse. "They have above all needlessly attempted to deface Reinach ..." he states, before moving from prose to a rhyming couplet centred on the page, and completes his thought: "The only being in nature/More ugly than his caricature." (39)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

III. Naturalism and La Bete Humaine

The relationship between the human and the animal emerged as a central problem in the literary world, where naturalists and others responded to the developments in scientific philosophy. Balzac saw in the relationship between man and society a similarity to the more basic precepts of animal existence: "Does not society make of man, according to the milieu in which his activity .takes place, as many different men as there are varieties in biology?" (40) Balzac realized the usefulness in this methodology, "If Buffon has made a magnificent work in trying to represent in a book the whole of zoology, has he not a work of this type to make for society?" (41) Thus, a major project of nineteenth-century literary naturalism was the inheritance or assumption of the mantle of "scientism" in order to tender the truth about the world and reality. (42) Balzac repeated Buffon's designation of animals as "excessively simple," forming a base which was present within the human, but which could not be descended to even by the most debased of individuals. Humanity was a foundation augmented by a hidden force, expressed through art and culture, that earned humans their unique place. Animals did not deviate throughout history, whereas men of all types "are entirely dissimilar and change according to the whims of civilization." (43) However, for Balzac "the animal is a principle that has an exterior form, or, to put it more precisely, the differences of his form, in the environment he is confined to develop in. Zoological species result from these differences ..." (44) Naturalism thus found in animality a more fluid device, one that played well into a critique of the status quo and so-called civilization.

Civilization was the operative key for naturalism's critique of the nineteenth century's misguided development. In literary form, Balzac's naturalist successor Emile Zola used the civilized and the natural as opposing forces refracted by experienced reality. In Germinal, the frustrated manager of the Montsou mines, M. Hennebeau, gazes upon the striking miners of the town. "Ah! To live as a beast!" he longs for. "He would have given everything, his education, his well-being, his wealth, his executive status, to be the least of the wretches who obeyed him, free of his flesh, and enough of a boor to smack around his wife and take pleasure with his neighbour's [wife]." Meanwhile the miners shout up at him, "dirty rotten pig, bloated and sick from stuffing himself with good things." (45) In allegories of social frustration and fantasy, constructions of animality appear at the forefront.

According to nineteenth-century compiler John Grand-Carteret, the first image of Zola to appear in the press was one that depicted the writer holding a magnifying glass and tongs, observing a small human dangling from the clutches of his medical instrument (sec Figure 2). (46) In this cartoon from L'Eclipse, he is shown in the process of examination with scientific implement. The specimen in particular is Eugene Rougon, whose struggle for political power during the Second Empire formed the topic of Zola's 1875 Son Excellence Eugene Rougon. This work formed the commencement of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, an experimental literary investigation into the unfolding process of heredity. The similarities shown between this depiction of Zola here and a later caricature of Edouard Drumont discussed below are important to note (see Figure 6).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The early image of Zola with the dissection tongs was, however, increasingly replaced by the writer immersed in the filth and mire of the natural world. These critical images usually depicted Zola as naked, or with a pig, and with the presence of feces. As Zola's career as a naturalist developed, the publication of works such as L'Assommoir (1877), Pot-Bouille (1882), Germinal (1885), and La Bete Humaine (1890) provoked wider criticism and disgust from sections of French society frustrated with his challenge to order, power structures, and tradition. The issue has been taken up by historians elsewhere, but the widespread use of pig imagery in anti-Dreyfusard and anti-Zola cartoons reflected deep anxieties regarding the natural and the civilized. (47) Civilization, in the form of culture and intellect, was the ground through which French ascendancy was articulated through science. The French considered themselves to be the most civilized of all nations, and as Elizabeth Childs has shown, they only needed to turn to science for proof. (48) The scientism of literary naturalism, however, was articulating a very different view. As Norman Kleeblatt has shown, the prevalence of scatological images relating to Zola demonstrate the utility of filth as an instructive device by those whose aim it was to reject it. (49) Max Nordau in his work Degeneration, talked of "the filth of Zola's art," charging that the "vanguard of civilization holds its nose at the pit of undiluted naturalism." (50) When Zola intervened on behalf of Dreyfus, the images wielded against him increasingly used scatological motifs. As Maya Balakirsky-Katz has shown, the symbol of the pig helped to establish the fin-de-siecle conflation of intellectual and Jew (see Figure 3). (51) However much construed as a symbol of Jewish intellectualism, the image of the pig was overtly a signifier of filth' and decadence--and emerged as the quintessential symbol for Zola and naturalism.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Frustrations with the depiction of "natural" development of French society by antisemites, traditionalists, and conservatives were nonetheless mitigated by the scapegoats of fin-de-siecle pessimism. National decline was on many minds at the end of the century. Articulated as cultural, biological, social, or racial, decline and degeneration formed major footholds in the scientific discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Prosper Lucas's 1850 Traite de l 'heredite, and Auguste Morel's 1857 Traite des degenerescences, as Ruth Harris argues, demonstrated a major interest, mid-century, in pathological bases for social decline. (52) For Morel, degeneration showed itself in the "morbid varieties of human species." (53) Scholars have shown that fears of the downward slope of progress were attached to a multitude of culprits. The rising masses, urban poor, foreigners, Jews, the upper classes, and were all in some part blamed by various members of French society for the descending trajectory of social progress. A neuresthenic basis for physiological degeneration was developed by the influential French physician Jean-Martin Charcot. (54) In this regard, the emerging problem of sanitation and public health was linked to qualitative assessments of French society. Dreyfus himself appears as a piece of refuse in one cartoon by Leon Roze. Playing on the bordereau's discovery in the wastebasket of Colonel von Swarzkoppen, here Dreyfus is found as, and amidst, the refuse of the Minister of War. (55)

Charcot's socio-medical explorations of physical and social degeneration were most famously elaborated by his German student, Max Nordau. Nordau's concept of degenerescence (degeneration) had its roots in the scientific study undertaken with his French mentor. However, his bestselling work built on concepts drawn from life experience--especially those condemning the "corruption and immorality" of the Symbolist poets and painters, combined with his clinical knowledge of neurological disorders. (56) Degeneration was often rendered through the allegory of a demonic, animal, or malformed birth. France, symbolized by Marianne, was depicted giving birth to hideous animal children. Heredity was a central factor within the process of degenerescence. (57) Inherited traits were often interpreted to be the cause of one's whole being, both body and mind. Prosper Lucas, in his Treatise on Natural History. found the concept of heredity as a fundamental law, and an innate property of the unfolding of time. (58) As Daniel Pick has shown, the idea of heredity underpinned the definition of degenerescence as pathological development. (59)

Anxieties about degeneration were often mapped onto a biological conception of the nation, in which degeneration was modulated by heredity. These fears underscored images of the demonic or malformed birth depicted in several cartoons produced during the Dreyfus Affair. Alfred Le Petit, a prominent French illustrator and artist, produced a pair of illustrations depicting the unnatural birth. In one illustration, entitled L'Affaire, the body of France gives birth to a serpentine child, marked Affaire Dreyfus. The child is not just sickly--it is a monster that threatens the present. Le Petit, however, presents the serpent with the hooknose of a caricatured Jew. The beast grasps at the breast of Marianne, feeding on the body of the French nation. Accompanying this illustration was another entitled "Il a fallu les forceps pour accoucher de ca" or, "it took the forceps to deliver that," with a deformed child presented to the viewer by the disembodied arm of the physician. This image was produced in 1899 but carries in its facial characteristics the angular, distorted qualities of cubism. The baby is inscribed "revision," referring to the Rennes trial in that year, with the forceps referencing the difficulty of the process. (60) Le Petit's child acts as an allegory, with hereditary degeneration subsumed beneath the freakish qualities of the child's form. The beastly child does not attach itself to the mother and continue to suck. Rather the opposite, the proto-cubist baby is an exorcism from the womb of France with little hope for life. It is a child of regret and scorn, the baby of a torn-apart society. It is also an unwanted child, Quasimodo the "pope of fools," a decoy and a dud. Balzac, in his introduction to La Comedie Humaine, discovered that "The Social State has risks that are not permitted in Nature, because it is Nature plus society." (61) Society had the ability to create more freaks than nature, since it held the power to construct human identities beyond physicality. The proto-cubism is important given Le Petit's contributions to artistic representations of the face. As Guillaume Doizy has argued, Le Petit produced much work that centred on the face as a mask. (62) In the cubist mode, the facial features are rendered as visual containers of beastliness, otherness, and freakishness, and they are of a social pathology, one that has infected the natural habitat of humanity, impossibly reducing it to a state of animality--mental and physical degeneration inscribed on the face.

IV. Human Masks, Animal Bodies

Lavater's monumental work on physiognomy, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was directed at the animal within man. The human face was like a mask, encrypted with the codes of the natural world. The science of physiognomy attempted to unlock the visceral truths of the natural, hidden as they were from the eyes and minds of the modern, industrial, and urban man. "We have men constantly before us," he wrote, "In the very smallest towns there is a continual influx and reflux of persons, of various and opposite characters: among these, many are known to us without consulting physiognomy." However, he adds, "There are men, with whom we have daily intercourse, and whose interest and ours are connected. Be their dissimulation what it may, passion will frequently, for a moment, snatch off the mask, and give us a glance, at least a side-view, of their true form." (63) As Lavater saw it, physical characteristics were encoded truths--encrypted in such a way as to hide and reveal simultaneously. Facial decoding was thus the privilege of the scientific mind. The code was a simple one-to-one encryption in which each physical trait referenced a natural truth.

Lavater echoed the emerging constructs outlined by scientists and theoreticians of the early nineteenth century, and considered the insect as a base level of animal. "Who, then, shall enumerate the gradations between insect and man?" he asked. (64) The face was, for Lavater, the site of human perfection above the animal. Lavater separated different parts of the body and showed them to be associated with different degrees of the three major ingredients of humanity: intelligence, animality, and morality. The cranium showed intelligence, while the marks on the face disclosed the moral fibre of the human. The animal dialectic was rendered below the shoulders. The lines of the face, the expressions, became the text through which the augmentation of animal automatism took form. As Christopher Forth has shown, many members of the French public attempted to catch a glimpse of Dreyfus's face--as he was paraded in public humiliation--so that they could decipher his guilt or innocence. (65)

Depictions of facial types, in Lavater's and subsequent physiognomic texts, were presented through the specimen-grid, and shared with zoological and other medical texts a compositional rationality whereby placement was an indicator of the natural order. Lavater defended the discipline by arguing that "physiognomy is the mirror of the Naturalist and the Sage." (66) His work and ideas, however, proved more useful for visual artists in their dialectical renderings of human characters. (67) A fundamental part of French academic training was the study of the tete d'expression: a series of rendered facial images depicting internal emotions. (68) The great illustrators Honore Daumier and J.J. Grandville used physiognomic motifs in their work (see Figure 4). Daumier's famous rendering of the monarch Louis-Phillipe slowly morphing into a pear shares physiognomic structure with Grandville's illustrations for the Magazine Pittoresque, of human-animal comparisons. Grandville's experimental pieces, of which he produced several, with various animals morphing into humans, set the path for animal physiognomies round in the cartoons of the Dreyfus Affair. On the cover for La Libre Parole Illustree, the artist Chanteclair depicted the President of the Republic Jean Casimir-Perier in four stages transforming into a dog. The piece was entitled physiognomie, and ridiculed Casimir's dog-like alliance to bourgeois interests in the early days of the Dreyfus Affair (see Figure 5). (69) Chanteclair used the motif for another cover of La Libre Parole Illustree, showing a vulture morphing into a grinning, Jewish Darwin. (70)

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[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Facial coding was a natural phenomenon and thus susceptible to the putatively deteriorating animal memory of humanity. Foreigners and enemies abounded in fin-de-siecle France, and whether by trickery or cosmopolitan blindness, they moved undetected through the streets of Paris and other cities. The mask as deceptive veil can be found in various images of the Dreyfus Affair. Dangling in the hands of Marianne on the title page of Rochefort's Album L'Intransigeant, are masks with the faces of prominent political figures. Rochefort's claim here is the de-masking of political rhetoric in the service of the nation. Forain's famous cover illustration for Psst! ... depicts a Prussian officer tying a mask depicting Zola onto the face of a grinning Jew. (71) Capturing the act of deception, Forain similarly unveils the allegorical "truth" that Zola is a Jew in the paid service of the Prussians.

In depictions of hybridity the face remained the site of humanity and a mark of social identity. Following Lavater, the body was reserved for the animal, and thus the base, instinctive, and degenerate. Animal identities, such as Jean-Baptiste Oudry's illustrations for La Fontaine's eighteenth century fables, articulated the dynamics of the animal: human binary at the level of composition. Animals in fables earned their subjectivity by exhibiting human features, while their identities and characteristics were rendered on the animal bodies they inhabited. With the development of caricature in the nineteenth century, satirists increasingly embraced the use of animal bodies to render their subjects. Perhaps some of the most well-known and distinctive images of the Dreyfus Affair are the Musee des Horreurs set of postcards by Victor Lenepveu in 1900. (72) Here, over forty political and public figures are rendered onto the bodies of different animals. The postcards were popular and so inflammatory that they were eventually banned by the Ministry of the Interior. The depiction of Zola on the head of a pig echoed with the ubiquitous association of naturalism with filth. However, the fat of the pig's body also helped to convey medical notions of unhealthiness. The Jewish degenerate, as Christopher Forth has shown, was imagined as fat from his parasitic sucking away at the health of the French body. (73) This helped to establish Zola's putative "Jewishness," and his deceitful actions against the French nation. In his appeals to honesty, Zola spoke from his masked face, but his body, rendered fat and filthy, did not lie. Drumont found the Jew hiding in costume: "To succeed in their attack on Christian civilization, the Jews in France had to trick, lie and take on the disguises of free-thinkers." (74) However, the body also represented the site of truth, as Jules de Gaultier wrote to his friend and leading anti-Dreyfusard Maurice Barres: "You know that in the world there are only states of temperament, with the difference and resemblances that result. The things most sacred are but the representation of this unique reality situated deep inside the body." (75) The body, therefore, contained the "ethnic and physiological realities," without which one was left with nothing. (76)

V. Infestation, Disease, and the National Body

Infiltration and assimilation threatened the health of the national body. The "blood and soil nationalism" of Maurice Barres or Charles Maurras presupposed the possibility of infection. Depictions that played upon this rhetoric often involved rats, spiders, and insects, and encouraged a blurring between tropes of animal infestation, viral infection, and insect proliferation. Drumont took it upon himself to identify and warn patriotic France of the "hidden forces" and "elusive beasts" that threatened national health. Drumont's uncovering of "Jews" and the "touch of Jewishness" were of course limitless, and of a paranoid nature. It was the very fact of Jewish vagueness that frightened Drumont, but it also allowed him room to stretch his labelling of society greatly. (77) The encrypted Jew, unseen, assimilated, baptized, represented the sharp end of the wedge supposedly driving its way into France. What was unseen represented a hostile and virus-like infection. Like cockroaches, you would not know they were there unless you switched the light on at night. Drumont appeared much like a physician, with both diagnosis and cure at hand. His kindred spirit Henri Rochefort was similarly depicted carrying a torch to illuminate Jews. A cartoon by Bobb in La Silhouette depicts Rochefort, lantern in one hand, cudgel in the other, perched atop a lighthouse representing the Republic. His lantern has illuminated several marked cesspools, "cesspit of empire, cesspit of Panama, cesspit of opportunism," and finally "cesspit of Dreyfus" in which a miniature Joseph Reinach is depicted drowning. (78)

Images of rats would have reminded readers of the plague or cholera, which, even though not transmitted by the disease, were widely thought to have been throughout the nineteenth century. The biological nature of the infestation was often mapped onto depictions of Jews attempting to scuttle into drainage openings on the sides of the street. The Jew was thus "the pest (l'animal nuisible) par excellance" and at the same time, "the elusive animal; indeed, he sneaks into so many things, that one knows not which end to grab him from." (79) Burrowing in, the insect-like race simultaneously represented disease and the infection of the national body. In a cartoon published nine days after the announcement of Dreyfus's arrest, Drumont was depicted in his La Libre Parole Illustree carrying the tongs of a scientist or physician, plucking a miniature, vermin-like Dreyfus and preventing him from scuttling away through a drainage hole to the sewers (see Figure 6). (80) Drumont, who constantly claimed to "find Jews everywhere," and who also published the name of a formerly anonymous accused officer, "A. Dreyfus," is taking more credit than he is due. In the image, however, Dreyfus is rendered as a typical symbolic Jew, complete with the headdress of the "foreign traitor"--the Prussian pickelhaube. He is marked across his forehead with "traitre," and he is the size of a common rodent. Gyp, illustrating as Bob, depicted Drumont as a cat for the satirical Le Rire, ready to pounce on the "Kike Rats" devouring the cheese of France as she sleeps in her chair. (81) In the same issue she depicts Algerian Jews who received French citizenship as locusts leaping up at the female figure of France. (82)

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

Issues related to infestation also fed into the French fear of declining birthrates. From within France, the spider--a prolific breeder--fitted this allegory well. The spider's web helped to augment this fear by depicting the appropriation and transformation of space for nefarious purpose. Jewish spiders crawled through France spinning and laying webs, proliferating in the unseen crevices of the nation. Drumont was obsessed with the idea of the "the Jewish gold-spider" a concept borrowed from German antisemitic literature ("die judische goldspinne") mentioned in his La France Juive. (83) The title page in the inside cover of the popular edition of La France Juive is adorned with a giant black spider and web hanging from the text (see Figure 7). (84) The web encompasses the first few letters of the subtitle Edition Populaire, while new threads stretch delicately over the test of the text, colonizing the test of the letters.

Bruno, illustrating for L 'Intransigeant, used the spider motif in various cartoons relating to the Dreyfus Affair. Early use of the spider, found in both La Libre Parole Illustree and L 'Intransigeant, are directed towards General Mercier, a major target of those campaigning against the presence of Jewish officers in the army on the cusp of the Affair. (85) In these several illustrations, Mercier, with slits for eyes and gangly frame, is depicted with a spider dangling from his furrowed brow. The meaning of this spider, however, becomes all the more clear in its appearance in cartoons produced during the Affair. One cartoon in particular, published in Album de L 'Intransigeant, shows spiders with the faces of Dreyfus peering down cheekily from the comers of Jean Jaures's office. Jaures, the socialist leader and newspaper editor, was instrumental in calling for the appeal of the Rennes verdict which would eventually exculpate Alfred Dreyfus (see Figure 8). Here, Jaures reclines, yawning in his office while his secretary sleeps slumped over her desk. Unseen, the Dreyfus-spiders spin their webs, covering over the filing cabinets behind the sleepers. "It's curious!" the caption reads, "The more it's a question of returning to the Affair, the less the affairs return." (86) The meaning is more clear in the original French, where the pun in the second "the affairs" refers to the business of the day ("Plus il est question de reprendre l'affaire, moins les affairs reprennent"). More revisions are only creating a diversion from the potency of French productivity. At Jaures's feet appears a paper exposing the fruit of his labours, "the return of the Affair" the headline reads. The cartoon was published in 1900, at the final moments of the Affair proper, when there was little ammunition left for the anti-Dreyfusards clamouring against the re-opening of the case. On the one hand, Bruno's persistence is characteristic of the antisemitic fin-de-siecle anti-Dreyfusard. On the other, the content of the cartoon is somewhat tepid--a pathetic appeal to desist and return to business as usual. The face of the captain rendered as a Jew-Spider, however, remains a potent symbol of the Jewish perpetrator and progenitor.

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

VI. The Primordial Serpent

Balzac conceptualized that different social environments created different "species" of people. (87) That the differences in human types were a product of different social environments meant that the more foreign and different the typology, the more exotic the animal. This way of representing the alien through animal allegory squares with the underlying discourse that informed illustrations of sea-monsters, serpents, snakes, and octopi. For the most part, the serpentine featured as a way to construct proximal (and by extension, cultural and racial) distance from France. Sea monsters and serpents often appeared in tales of fantastical adventure, such as Jules Verne's popular 1864 Voyage to the Center of the Earth. This novel features levels of animal-temporal distance, with the ancient dinosaurs occupying the very centre of the Earth. Another adventure story, the adventures of Admiral Roland, takes the reader to the edges of the colonial world where a dragon-vampire attacks and feasts on natives. The famous illustrator, Gustave Dore, produced a plethora of illustrations for mid-century publications of Jonah and the Whale, as well as Ludovico Ariosto's Renaissance fantasy Orlando Furioso, which included depictions of dragon-slaying and tentacled sea monster attacks. This typology was very often directed squarely at Jews within France. Creatures from other worlds, referenced several important texts: biblical tales (Adam and Eve, Jonah and the Whale), Hercules and the Hydra, the beast of the apocalypse. Lenepveu's Musee des Horreurs depicted Dreyfus with the body of the Hydra--a seven-headed water-beast that grew two new beads for each one cut off (see Figure 9). Lenepveu reserved the body of a slippery octopus for the Jewish banker Alphonse de Rothschild, labelled in a conflation of animalized rhetoric, as "king of the pigs!" (88) The same octopus-Rothschild can be seen conquered by a heroic French Gaul on an electoral pamphlet from 1898. (89)

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

The world of the dragons, demons, serpents, and sea-monsters contained narratives of national-racial discourse. The depictions of the serpents reflected a scientific interest in the transhistorical narratives of primordial and primeval. They were monsters of the ancient past, discovered only in the most recent times. Dinosaurs figured as animals of primordial scale, massive beasts of biblical or mythological proportion whose shared heritage with lizards and crocodiles was often emphasized. Bohner, a monist theorist, wrote of the exciting recent discoveries of dinosaurs in his work:

   The long-necked sea dragon (plesiosaurus) was a gigantic
   Jurrasic lizard, that reached more than 25 feet in length ...
   Gharials (megalosaurus, hyoeosaurus [Hylaeosaurus], etc.)
   were gigantic 30 foot long monsters, similar to crocodiles,
   covered by an impenetrable armour, with a head of 5 or 6 feet
   in length, and a slit mouth longer yet, so that their jaws armed
   with powerful hooked teeth, were able to crush in an instant an
   animal the size of an ox ... Hydrarchos [Basilosaurus] skeletons
   were found measuring 50 to 80 feet! (90)

Bohner attempted to reconcile the unity of evolution with his Christianity, seeing in the new scientific developments of the age a divine rationality. (91) His descriptions of the primordial world, containing details of fossils, "microscopic organisms" (animalcules microscopiques), and masses of water, are rendered in the language of genesis and mythology. The microscopic organisms, a feature of the "creator's ideas," and the monsters of the sea emerging from "the bowels of the Earth." (92) The Jewish sea monster, dragon, was thus a primordial enemy--atavistic and archaic, and threateningly so.

VII. Birds of Prey

Teleological redemption, the foundation of many modern ideologies, abounded in Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard rhetoric alike. The stakes were set severely high, with the credibility of some of France's most powerful institutions and public figures under scrutiny. The failure of Rennes, the Zola trial, and the trial of Esterhazy to redeem the institutions from the stranglehold of ideological rhetotic only helped to sever these institutions from their inherited claims to Justice, Truth, and the Nation. Biological redemption--cleansing--was mapped onto the nation as a body. Ravens, eaters of carrion, who fly in "conspiracies," featured as a severe threat for the unfolding of future attack. Whereas the insect or the sea monster appeared as allegorical beings of the present moment, ravens signalled a distant warning for the future. Eaters of carrion, ravens do not attack, but rather devour the desiccated corpse of a body already defeated or dead. The circling of ravens thus took part in some of the more ontologically abstract discourse--textual places where total ideas competed at the heart of the Affair.

Whether Dreyfusard or not, birds are featured widely in illustrations as signifiers of a higher presence. This presence could manifest as divinity, truth, justice, and even as a threat, an ominous force of destruction or redemption. In all illustrations the birds are located at the top of the composition in the open sky, the site of the abstractions like heaven or truth. The trope of circling birds is thus found on those illustrations that convey the desperately confident sureness of the ontological base from which they take root. In Dreyfusard illustrations they appear behind Truth and Justice, often as nudes or classically rendered females, who serve as conduits between the abstract and the earthly. The birds dart and circle at the moment before justice is meted out, their blizzard of activity serving to illustrate the potential weight and force of their actions upon earth. However, in anti-Dreyfusard usage, birds carried a more grotesque symbolism garnered from the Gothic literary styles of the nineteenth century. Circling birds were a mainstay of illustrated works such as Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, or Gustave Dore's engravings for Balzac's Les Contes Drolatiques, Dante's Inferno,

Milton's Paradise Lost, or Poe's The Raven (see Figure 10). In many ways, the depiction of birds reveals promises of revenge, redemption, and retribution. In the hands of anti-Dreyfusards, they often took converse roles, to symbolize the threat of Jewish infiltration, degeneration, or the looming force of Jewish expulsion by antisemites. The power of vengeance, therefore, is also the power of teleologies--religious, humanist, or those of modern construction--national racialism, and modern antisemitism. For Drumont, the violent bird was the perfect symbol for the Jew: "For Drumont, the violent bird was the perfect symbol for the Jew: "The truest emblem of the Jew is the villainous bird that cynically settles himself in a nest built by others." (93)

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Ravens appeared in the work of Adolphe Willette, including his "antisemitic candidate" election campaign poster from 1889. (94) This poster blends iconic imagery of the Jew looking vampiric before the skyline of Paris, with the presence of ravens. Another illustration, by Willette in his Le Pierrot, shows a vampire-Jew wearing a crown labelled "S.M. Rothschild, king of France." (95) "Winter will be hard for the goyim," reads the inscription, as rats, wolves, and ravens descend upon Paris. (96) The ominous birds were often coupled with idealized imagery of Justice and the French military. Warriors gleaned from the past, seem as glorious to the anti-Dreyfusards, returned to wage redemptive battle against the degenerate present. "Today's dream, tomorrow's reality!" is the title of a front page illustration for La Libre Parole Illustree tying the decline of the French military to the presence of Jews in France (see Figure 11). (97) The cartoon was a part of the newspaper's 1892 campaign against Jews in the army. At the base of the illustration, a present day foot-soldier dreams of a meeting between France's glorious military past, embodied as a mounted medieval knight, and a modern mounted soldier, charging in tandem from the top left of the picture. On the middle right, directly in the field of attack, are soldiers in murky retreat, hunched over, with Jewish figures behind. Above the retreating French soldiers, in the top right, are large birds of prey, set against a red backdrop. The birds represent tomorrow's reality, today. The birds' flight path appears like a mirror image of the French knights, and as such they speak of impending devastation at the hands of Jews. Similarly, Le Journal Illustree depicted the female figure of Justice casting a moneybag-clutching Dreyfus into an open crypt full of wild-haired, naked figures while, behind Justice, is the army with birds circling overhead. (98) Somewhat unique as an anti-Dreyfusard illustration, the artist linked the ideal of Justice with the prospect of vengeance.

A cartoon by Gyp, published in the more moderate daily Le Rire, depicts ravens at a country fete. The birds, again, appear alongside military figures. Here, however, they symbolize the threat of international Jewish capitalism as represented by the Panama scandal. (99) Gyp's cartoon, published in 1895, depicts a bourgeois Jew taking a fairground hammer to the feet of a naked woman representing France--the prize marker above her head features the head of Dreyfus. To her right another Jewish bourgeois clutches bags marked "100,000,000,000." The man with the hammer is supported by the heads of an infantryman and an officer, and above his head circle the ravens. The tag-line, "sure, France is not at the wedding party," clearly indicates that all the carnivalesque uproar and antics within France are for somebody else's entertainment. The birds are circling in the background, and one pecks at a military figure's head. The attack on the military by the ravens also suggests a threat to the very institution set up to protect the French from all threats.

For supporters of Dreyfus, circling birds were used to represent transcendent ideals in similar ways. However, their deployment was always more abstract, since the institutions of Justice and Tradition--like the French military mentioned above--had been usurped by corruption, vanity, and bigotry. The hero of the day, Zola, was often depicted as Christlike. (100) In one image by Denizard Orens, Zola is depicted as Christ holding symbols of Truth and Liberty, the mirror and the torch. Large birds circle above his body, while in the background Picquart carries Esterhazy by his collar, pointing him to a cross in the background curiously labelled with a question mark (see Figure 12). The picture refers to the events of 1898: "E. Zola accuses the council of having Esterhazy acquitted." (101) Orens often floated between harsh condemnations of Dreyfus and an open spirit to the actions of Zola. The question mark floating above the cross symbolizes the tensions mounting between the public, the courts, and the ideals of truth and justice. The publication of Zola's J'Accuse immediately followed the acquittal of Esterhazy by court-martial in January of 1898. By February, Zola had been found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison for libel. Who was to go to the cross? The postcard, however, was produced in 1904, and followed an earlier 1902 illustration of Zola riding as Christ on a donkey. Referring to the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem and the instigation of his final days for the salvation of man, Orens completed the pair by depicting the crucifixion. The ravens, circling above the head of Zola, constitute the immanence of divinely ordained justice. But whether this will mean a crucifixion of Zola or Esterhazy is left ambiguous. Death and justice in France at the dawn of the twentieth century was far from morally clean-cut. The institutions of justice and order were indeed only two years away from completely absolving Dreyfus, and crucifixion was the order of corrupt politics and sinful man--far from the arm of justice. The Affair had stirred in France a desire for the cathartic chiliasm of teleological redemption. The birds of prey, whether reserved for the devouring of Jews or the sweeping away of the old order, would not come in one flock, but would take their feast in 1914 and 1940, with terrible results.

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

VIII. Conclusion

This study has focused on representations from the French right as well as from the liberal and progressive left. For the most part, however, visual representations of animality were useful for the anti-Dreyfusards. The ideas of the French right were during this time underpinned by biological-national xenophobia and antisemitism. For these reasons, illustrations in the papers of the non-conformist right, La Libre Parole, L'Intransigeant, Psst! ..., dominated this paper. The idea of animality as an anthropological device constructed through the binary human/animal, employed to determine the quality of humanity, round usefulness for a wide section of French society undergoing massive identity and confidence issues provoked by monumental change. The crystalline permutations of fin-de-siecle pessimism, are too many to reiterate here. Suffice it to say that investigations of the animal were in high order throughout the century, leading to a rich pool of cultural and political imagery and devices through which political concerns could be processed. Drumont himself complained during the Affair: "It seems we are in the middle of a sort of masquerade, where bizarre characters, covered in grotesque rags, mutter and fidget, the dead who have absolutely no sense. (102) His nemesis Reinach later reflected "we were all living in a Wagnerian world ... and had lost our notions of reality." (103) This was, in Richard Griffith's words, "a politics that favoured the eye," and as such, it remained in the minds of many as a period populated by demons, beasts, birds of prey, and carnivalesque, grotesque characters.

(1) This title has been used in various permutations in publications of the Affair that seek to articulate the heroic efforts of the Dreyfusards. See Lorraine Beitler (ed.), Dreyfus & Zola: A Moment in the Conscience of the World: An Exhibition from the Lorraine Beitler collection (Toronto, 2000); Guy Crepin, Un Moment de la Conscience Humaine (Berck-sur-Mer. 2004).

(2) See Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore, 2004).

(3) Venita Datta, "From Devil's Island to the Pantheon? Alfred Dreyfus, the Anti-Hero," in Christopher Forth (ed.) Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle France: Bodies. Minds and Gender. (New York, 2010), pp. 217-34.

(4) See Ruth Harris, "Two Salonnieres during the Dreyfus Affair: the Marquise Arconati Visconti and Gyp" in Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle France: Bodies. Minds and Gender, in Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo (eds.), pp. 235-49.

(5) Harris, "Two Salonnieres during the Dreyfus Affair" p. 236, Described by Mary Louise Roberts as "deeply unlikable," studies on Gyp have been late in coming due to her problematic antifeminist and antisemitic character. See Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France, (Chicago, 2002), p. 9.

(6) See Norman Kleeblatt. "MERDE! The Caricatural Attack against Emile Zola," Art Journal, 52:3, (Autumn 1993), pp. 54-58, and Maya Balakirsky-Katz, "Emile Zola and the Cochonnerie of Naturalist Literature and the Judensau." Jewish Social Studies: History Culture, Society. 13:1 (Fall 2006), pp. 110-35.

(7) Paula Hymen, "The Dreyfus Affair, the Visual and the Historical," Journal of Modern History, 61:1 (March 1981), p. 91.

(8) See, for example, Robert Justin Goldstein. Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France (Ohio, 1989), p. viii.

(9) Micheal Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: a Documentary History (Boston, 1999), p. 4.

(10) Frederick Busi, The Pope of Antisemitism: the Career and Legacy of Edouard-Adolphe Drumont (Lanham, 1986), p. 141.

(11) Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair, p.8, and Pierre Olivier Perl, "Caricatures de Zola: du Naturalism et l'Affaire Dreyfus.'" Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, 24:1 (1998) p. 144.

(12) Jean-Denis Bredin (trans. Jeffrey Mehlman), The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (New York, 1986), p. 518.

(13) Bredin, The Affair, p.518.

(14) For Paula Hymen, the Dreyfus Affair entered the consciousness of the middle classes through its commercialization in novelty form. See Hymen, "The Dreyfus Affair," p. 100. On the issue of commodification of French politics and the Dreyfus Affair, sec also Nancy Fitch, "Mass Culture, Mass Parliamentary Politics, and Modern Anti-Semitism," American Historical Review, 97, no.1 (February 1992), pp. 55-95.

(15) John Fraser "Propaganda on the Picture Board," Oxford Art Journal, 3 no. 2 (1980), p. 40.

(16) Contemporary cartoon compiler John Grand-Carteret acknowledged the complementary relationship between the press and the Affair, whereby the former instigated the latter and in which each fed off the other in turn, creating an "avalanche of white paper." Carteret in particular highlighted the nefarious accomplishments by spurious "papiers noircis" especially Le Matin which made and blackened its name by publishing the bordereau and instigating the Affair. See John Grand-Carteret, L'affaire Dreyfus et l'image (Paris, 1898), p.4.

(17) Linda Nochlin, "Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A Portrait of the Artist as an Anti-Semite," Norman Kleeblatt (ed), The Dreyfus Affair, Art. Truth. Justice (Berkeley, 1987), p. 96.

(18) Having said this, an attempt to show the public that photography was not as truthfully representative was carried on the front page of Le Siecle, 11 January 1899 entitled "Les mensonges de la photographie." Photo manipulation techniques were used to show the coupling of unlikely characters, such as Joseph Reinach and Edouard Drumont, posing together for a shot. See, plate 107, Kleeblatt (ed), The Dreyfus Affair; Art, Truth, Justice, p. 212.

(19) Tom Gunning, The Mind of Modernism: medicine, psychology, and the cultural arts in Europe and America. 1880-1940 (Stanford, 2004), p. 148.

(20) Richard Griffiths, The Use of Abuse: The Polemics of the Dreyfus Affair and its Aftermath, (Oxford, 1991). p. 30.

(21) See Phillipe Roberts-Jones in Robert Justin Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France (Kent, Ohio, 1989), p. 238.

(22) La Libre Parole Illustree, 17 July 1893. Translated by the author.

(23) Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, "L'image, figure majeure du discours antisemite? Vingtieme Siecle," Revue d'histoire 4, no. 72 (2001), p. 27.

(24) See Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War 11 and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2006), and Sander Gilman The Jew's Body (New York, 1991).

(25) S.R. Cohen, "Animal Performance in Oudry's Illustrations to Fables of La Fontaine," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 39 (2010), p. 53.

(26) See Carolus Lirmeaus, Systema Naturoe Per Regna Tria Naturoe, Tomus I (Uppsala, 1758).

(27) Londa L. Schiebinger, Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, 1993), p. 11.

(28) The original French reads "plus parfait." Translated by the author.

(29) Barbara Larson, "Evolution and Degeneration in the Early Work of Odilon Redon," Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide 2, no. 2 (Swing 2003), np.

(30) Paul Gervais, Zoologie, compenant l'anatomie, la physiologie, la classification et l'histoire naturelle des animaux: elements des sciences naturelles (Paris, 1866), p. 1. Translated by the author.

(31) Ibid., pp. 249-250. Translated by the author.

(32) See Freeman Henry, "Anti-Darwinism in France: Science and the Myth of Nation," Nineteenth Century French Studies 27, no. 3-4 (1999), pp. 290-304.

(33) Ruth Harris. Murders and Madness: Medicine. Law, and Society in the fin de siecle. (Oxford. 1989), p. 65.

(34) Barbara Larson, "Evolution and Degeneration in the Early Work of Odilon Redon," np.

(35) Paul Vernial, Origine de l'homme d'apres les lois de l'evolution naturelle (Paris, 1881), pp. 124-25. Translated by the author.

(36) Drumont quoted in Bredin, p. 79. From La Libre Parole Nov. 6, 1894.

(37) "Le Juif au Jardin des Plantes," La Libre Parole Illustree, May 10, 1895, no. 117. Translated by the author.

(38) Bruno, "au Jardin des Plantes," Album de L'Intransigeant (Paris, 1900). np. Translated by the author.

(39) Henri Rochefort, "La Politique en Imager," Album de L'Intransigeant (Paris, 1900), np. Translated by the author.

(40) Balzac, "Avant Propos," in La Comedie Humaine (Paris: 1842), pp. 18-19.

(41) Balzac, quoted in Louise Lyle, "Contesting Balzac through Darwin in Zola, Bourget, and Barres," in Nineteenth Century French Studies 36:3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 2008), p. 307. Translated by the author.

(42) Lyle, "Contesting Balzac through Darwin in Zola, Bourget, and Barres," p. 308.

(43) Balzac, La Comedie Humaine, p. 20. Translated by the author.

(44) Ibid., p. 18. Translated by the author.

(45) Emile Zola, Germinal (Paris, 1883), pp. 397-98. Translated by the author.

(46) John Grand-Carteret, Zola en Images: 280 illustrations: portraits, caricatures, documents divers (Paris, 1908).

(47) Sec Bertrand Tillier, Cochon de Zola, ou Les infortunes caricatures d'un ecrivain engage (Paris, 1998), for an exhaustive collection of cartoons featuring Zola depicted as a pig.

(48) Elizabeth C. Childs, Daumier and Exoticism: Satirizing the French and the Foreign (New York, 2004), p. 100.

(49) Kleeblatt, "MERDE!," pp. 54-58.

(50) Max Nordau, Degeneration. Trans. by George L. Mosse (Lincoln, Neb., 1993), p. 13.

(51) See Balakirsky-Katz. "Emile Zola, the Cochonnerie of Naturalist Literature, and the Judensau," pp. 110-35.

(52) Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness, p. 51.

(53) Morel, quoted in Harris, Murders and Madness, p. 54.

(54) Deborah Silverman, Art-Nouveau in Fin-de-siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style, (Berkeley, 1989), p. 80.

(55) Crepin, Un moment de la conscience humaine, p. 275.

(56) Silverman, Art Nouveau in fin-de-siecle France, p. 82.

(57) See Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: a European Disorder (New York, 1989).

(58) Ibid., p. 48.

(59) Ibid., p. 49.

(60) Kleeblatt, (ed) The Dreyfus Affair, Art, Truth, Justice, p. 185.

(61) Balzac, La Comedie Humaine. p. 18. Translated by the author.

(62) Guillaume Doizy "Alfred Le Petit et la caricature << solide >> : precurseur des Avant-gardes?" Ridiculosa 13 (2006), pp. 19-32.

(63) Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomy, trans. Samuel Shaw (London, 1826), p. 18.

(64) Ibid., p. 25.

(65) Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood, p. 32.

(66) Lavater, quoted in John House. "Toward a "Modern" Lavater? Degas and Monet," in Melissa Percival and Graeme Tyler (eds.), Physiognomy in Profile, Lavate's impact on European Culture (Cranbury, NJ. 2005), p. 182. Translated by the author.

(67) As Tom Gunning has noted, the discipline entered steep decline by the end of the century in scientific circles. See Gunning, The Mind of Modernism, p. 144. Interestingly, a 1912 article in the Parisian satirical weekly Le Pele Mele evaluating the legacy of Lavater's work found that he had failed to lay a brick in the wall he founded, and "up to now, the men the most qualified to decipher the face of their contemporaries have been not the scientists but rather artists, painters and illustrators." "La Lecture du Visage," Le Pele Mele, February 4, 1912, p. 11. Translated by the author.

(68) Ibid.

(69) See La Libre Parole Illustree, August 4, 1894.

(70) Chanteclair "Darwinisme,'" La Libre Parole Illustree, no. 110, August 17, 1895.

(71) Jules Forain, "'L'Affaire Dreyfus. Allegorie" Psst...!. July 1898.

(72) For a complete reproduction of the forty-five postcards, see Laurent Gerveraeu and Christophe Prochasson (eds), L 'Affaire Dreyfus et le Tournant du Siecle (1894-1910), (Nanterre, 1994), pp. 91-96. Much less well known are Lenepveu's accompanying postcards of various "upstanding figures" in his Musee des Patriotes, some of which are depicted in the same collection, p. 43.

(73) Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood, p. 197.

(74) Edouard Drumont, La France Juive: Essai d'histoire contemporaine, I, treizieme ed. (Paris, 1886), p. 123. Translated by the author.

(75) Gautier quoted in Richard Griffiths, The Use of Abuse: The Polemics of the Dreyfus Affair and its Aftermath (New York, 1991), p. 27. Translated by the author.

(76) Gautier quoted in Ibid. Translated by the author.

(77) Drumont, quoted in Busi, The Pope of Antisemitism, p. 64.

(78) La Silhouette, 2 January 1898. in Grand-Carteret, L'Affaire Dreyfus et l'image, p. 116. Translated by the author

(79) Drumont, La France Juive, p. 317. Translated by the author.

(80) See, La Libre Parole Illustree, Nov. 10 1894, in Bums, France and the Dreyfus Affair, p. 35.

(81) Le Rire. 14 November 1896, in Kleeblatt (ed.), The Dreyfus Affair, Art. Truth, Justice, plate 4., p. 155.

(82) Ibid., plate 3., p. 154.

(83) Drumont, La France Juive, p. 103. Translated by the author.

(84) Edouard Drumont, La France Juive: Edition populaire 10ems ed., (Paris, 1890).

(85) Bredin, The Affair, p. 59.

(86) Bruno, "L'Affaire et les Affaires" Album de L 'Intransigeant (Paris, 1900). np. Translated by the author.

(87) Balzac, La Comedie Humaine. p. 18.

(88) Musee des Horreurs, no.2 (1900), in Gerveraeu and Prochasson (eds.), L 'Affaire Dreyfus et le Tournant du Siecle, p. 91. Translated by the author. My use of "conflation" may be ignored if one substitutes "pig" for "Jew" following Maya Balakirsky-Katz. See footnote 6 above.

(89) Crepin. Un Moment de la Conscience Humaine, p. 27.

(90) August Nathaniel Bohner Du materialisme au point de vue des sciences naturelles. et des progres de l'esprit humain (Geneva, 1861), pp. 310-11. Translated by the author. Note that the "Hydrarchos" was eventually found to be a conflation of several other "sea-serpent" dinosaurs by the "Dr." Albert Koch. See, D.E. Jones "Doctor Koch and his 'Immense Antediluvian Monsters'" Alabama Heritage. 12 (1989).

(91) Bernhard Kleeberg, "'God-Nature Progressing: Natural Theology in German Monism," Science in Context, (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 537-69.

(92) Bohner, Du materialisme au point de vue des sciences naturelles, p. 309. Translated by the author.

(93) Drumont. La France Juive. p. 33. Translated by the author.

(94) Crepin, Un Moment de la Conscience Humaine, p. 14.

(95) Le Pierrot, no. 21, 30th August, 1889. Translated by the author.

(96) Kleeblatt, (ed), The Dreyfus Affair, Art, Truth, Justice, p. 67.

(97) La Libre Parole Illustree no. 17 April, 1893. Translated by the author.

(98) Gerveraeu and Prochasson (eds.), L 'Affaire Dreyfus et le Tournant du Siecle, p. 14.

(99) Kleeblatt (ed.) The Dreyfus Affair, Art. Truth, Justice, p. 84.

(100) For an elaboration on the use of Christ imagery in the Affair, see, Christopher Forth, "Bodies of Christ: Gender, Jewishness and Religious Imagery in the Dreyfus Affair," History Workshop Journal 48 (Autumn 1999), pp. 16-39.

(101) Translated by the author.

(102) Drumont, quoted in Jean Nelson Jensen, "Editorials of Edouard Drumont in "La Libre Parole," 1892-1906: A Reflection of the Times," (Ph.D. diss. Brigham Young University, 1980), p. 68. Translated by the author.

(103) Joseph Reinach, quoted in John J. Cerullo, "Religion and the Psychology of Dreyfusard Intellectualism," Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 24, no. 1 (1998), p. 93.

David C. Jones grew up in England and Canada. He completed his Bachelor's degree at York University where he was the recipient of the Desmond Hart Memorial Prize. In 2010 he earned his Master's from the University of Toronto with an earlier version of this article as his MA paper. He is the winner of the 2010 Canadian Journal of History Graduate Essay Prize for the best paper by a graduate student.